About a week ago, Aidan and I flew out of México City for Tuxtla Gutierrez airport. We arrived in the late afternoon, wondered where the hell we were, got in a mini bus for a bumpy hour then slumped our stuff into San Cristobal’s famous ‘Magic Hostel’. The noisiest, funnest, worst showered hostel in Mexico.
Noisiest. Sleep before 2AM is not an option because there is always a party going on. This killed Aidan – a lad who needs to spent at least half of his life flat out snoring.
Funnest. Not going to get any sleep anyway, I got up, met a few people and ended up dancing till dawn in a reggae bar and getting to know a few cool and happening people.
Worst showered. The shower is cold, not very forceful and in the same space as the toilet. San Cristobal is really freezing so going without a hot shower is no joke. Funny that San Cristobal’s Magic Hostel has terrible showers. So does the Magic Hostel in Oaxaca.
After a bit of a sleep in, Aidan and I went for breakfast on the zocalo. A couple that radiated Buddha joy and calm asked me to help translate the breakfast menu for them and ended up inviting us to go on a tour with them. They are the beautiful Eli and Sagit pictured in some of our adventures. Our first tour, the one that was Eli and Sagit’s idea, was out to the wonderful indigenous villages of Chomula and Zincatan.
Chomula is nothing special to look at. Ordinary buildings, ordinary cars, nice cathedral with some unusual tile work. That’s about it. At first glance it is a normal mountain village. As we walked around the place our guide, Cesar, pointed out that the crosses, which you see all over town, are always braced with fresh pine branches and are painted green with white carvings. These are not crosses to the Christian god and were here before the Spanish invaded. They are dedicated to the worship of pine trees. We went into the church and found that there was not a mass but a whole other set of rites going on in there. Many coloured candles were arranged on the floor in squares, and people were standing or kneeling and quietly praying inside, or in front of, the squares. There were a lot of chickens. Wikipedia describes the Maya religion in the past tense. It states that ‘If the interpretations of the shamans spelled bad times to come, sacrifices would be performed to change the moods of the gods. Sacrifices might be small animals like chickens, or "bloodletting" by high officials, and sometimes included human sacrifices’. We didn’t see a human sacrifice, but we did see a lot of chickens spending their last moments being waved around naughty people to absorbe their sins. The Maya religion is alive and well in Chiapas. The way people dress, the fact that you are not allowed to take photos in the church, the chickens, the fact that the last catholic priest was expelled from the village in 1969 – all signify that this culture is an on-going concern.
Zincatan is similar in some ways, but different in others. Chomula is more modern in terms of cars, television and housing. Zincatan is more catholic, but people live a more traditional way in terms of weaving, cooking on wood fired stoves etc.
Mayan villages seem to be a mix of strong and troubled. Certainly, they are not very well off in terms of money, but culturally they are loaded. Back in San Cristobal there are so many indigenous people about. Women from Chomula can be identified by their thick woolen skirts and colourful shirts, the men by a heavy black woolen jacket. They sell excellent hand woven things like bags, belts and bracelets.
There is also a lot of begging. You don’t see people in traditional dress begging much, it is usually indigenous people who are not wearing traditional clothing. I wonder if they are people who have been expelled from their communities. Apparently you can be expelled for quite a few things, but the most common is changing religion. The elders recognise that religion is a fundamental part of culture and don’t want their culture to be eroded. They are having a running battle with American evangelists who have just spent 3 million dollars translating the bible into the local dialect of Chomula. Those bastards should do jail time for that, it is a direct attack and a deadly insult. The evangelists are fanatics and don’t care that these people have an ancient and cool religion that provides meaning to their lives and structure to their society. They just want to make themselves ‘right’. This has been going on for 500 years.
Anyway, after our lovely day in the villages we went on a trip to the Canyon. It was pretty hot and to get to the canyon I crammed myself into a mini bus between two big Swedish guys. Nice guys sure, but quite hot and sticky to the touch. My head banged on the roof every time we hit a pot hole, the windows wouldn’t open and it became an oven. After about an hour we got to the river and took a boat. Very beautiful, apart from the aligators, 2 metre long lizards and the buzzards, the canyon reminded me of the Hawkesbury River near Sydney. Lovely.
After the boat trip we had lunch in Tuxtla Gutierrez, then came back to San Cristobal for yet another crazy night out with a whole stack of hostel people. This time, the posse started out in a Jazz Bar that Aidan had spotted while we were walking around town. He seems to like drinking Martinis in Jazz bars and who can blame him, it`s pretty cool.
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